Missing Pieces(34)
Sarah, Jack and Hal loaded into the rental car, and Dean and Celia followed behind them. They sat in silence as they drove, the air in the car thick with the weight of their sadness. In merely a few days, their entire world had been turned upside down. This should have been a time of reflection and fond remembrance, and instead Jack’s family was at the center of a murder investigation.
They drove through Penny Gate, past Saint Finnian’s, the church where Julia’s funeral was to be held, and past the cemetery. The town seemed to still be mostly asleep. A boy with a canvas delivery bag hanging over his shoulder was sleepily tossing rolled newspapers toward doorsteps, and an elderly couple walked their dog. For now they were oblivious to the murder investigation. Sarah sympathized with them—in just a few hours their quaint, small town would be shaken with the gossip that one of their own had been possibly brutally murdered.
Jack turned down a street lined with maple and oak trees emblazoned in full fall colors. When they finally arrived at the sheriff’s office, Sarah thought the modest two-leveled building looked more like a schoolhouse than a place where murder suspects were interrogated and booked. Jack pulled into a parking spot and Dean maneuvered his truck in the space next to him. Together they made their way through the main entrance.
Gilmore had arrived before any of them and was waiting by the front counter. Sarah looked around for Margaret Dooley, but she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a young female deputy was sitting behind the counter, talking on the phone while jotting down notes.
Gilmore greeted them with a grim smile. “Help yourself to some coffee.” He pointed to a table where a coffeemaker bubbled and steamed.
“Is Amy here?” Jack asked. His hair, Sarah noticed, was sticking up at odd angles, and his shirt was rumpled and only partly tucked in. In fact, all of them looked half put together. Except for Celia, of course, who managed to make yoga pants and an oversize tunic look lovely.
Gilmore, on the other hand, was wide-awake and alert, his uniform starched and wrinkle-free. Sarah realized then that Gilmore knew exactly what he was doing. He had caught them all off guard, showing up at the house at the crack of dawn with his warrant, skillfully luring them away from the house and to his office where he could question them on his own terms.
“We’re still asking Amy a few questions,” Gilmore explained.
“She’s been here all night?” Celia asked incredulously. “Has she been able to get any sleep? Anything to eat? Has she been arrested?”
“Now don’t you worry about Amy. I promise we’re taking good care of her,” Gilmore said, then tapped his palms on the desk in a quick rhythm as if to punctuate the end of the conversation. “Now, why don’t we get down to business? Jack, let’s start with you?”
“Why Jack?” Sarah asked. “We weren’t even in town when Julia fell.” Sarah thought, naively, that they were only here for moral support. If either of them warranted questioning, she figured it would be her, since she was the one who was at Amy’s house when the bloodstained object was found.
“You might be surprised,” Gilmore said.
“This is insane,” Dean muttered as Jack and Gilmore disappeared down a hallway.
“Well, we might as well sit down and wait,” Celia said, reaching for a foam cup. “Hal, would you like some coffee?”
He shook his head and settled into one of the chairs. “We should be planning Julia’s funeral,” he fretted. “I haven’t even had a chance to go to the funeral home yet. I haven’t picked out a casket.”
“We’ll take care of all that when we’re finished here,” Celia soothed. “Drink this,” she pressed, handing him the coffee cup despite his protestations. “I can’t imagine we’ll be here for very long. I mean, we don’t know anything. None of us were even at the house when Julia fell. I’m sure the sheriff will come to the conclusion very quickly that if it wasn’t an accident, whoever killed Julia was a stranger. An intruder.”
“You keep telling yourself that, Celia,” said Dean, glowering from where he stood by the window. “But I guarantee Amy is the one who did this. And if by some miracle Gilmore lets her out of jail, I will strangle her with my bare hands.”
“Dean, just sit down and relax,” Celia ordered. “Let the sheriff do his job.” Despite the violent interaction Sarah had seen between Dean and Celia yesterday, Celia did not seem afraid of her husband.
Forty-five minutes later, Jack emerged from the sheriff’s office looking drawn and unnerved. “He asked for you next,” he said to Celia, and nervously, she rose to her feet.
For the first time all morning, Sarah noticed a crack in Celia’s unflappable veneer. Suddenly she seemed uneasy, and Dean took her in his arms. “You’ll be fine,” he soothed, then touched his lips to her forehead. Once again, Sarah found herself confused by the dynamic between the two of them. One minute they were grabbing and slapping each other and screaming, and the next they were the picture of a perfect marriage.
Sarah turned her attention to Jack. “What did he ask you?”
“I think I need some air,” he said, ignoring her question. “I’m going for a walk.” Jack rubbed a hand across his face where rough dark stubble had appeared overnight.
“Wait,” Sarah said, getting up and following him to the door. “Don’t run off. You don’t get to just run off.”